Imagine for a moment: you’re behind the wheel of a Porsche. You crank the engine and feel it rumble alive beneath you, like a beast awakened. With an instructor strapped in beside you, you begin to take this animal of a car through its gears down a long straightaway. By the time you pass the start/finish line of the Barber Motorsports track you’ve got that baby in fourth gear. You approach the first turn, a sharp lefthand, downhill turn. Your palms are sweating in your gloves and your heart feels like it might just possibly beat right out of your chest. Under the guidance of the instructor, you approach the turn on the right side of the track. You brake hard initially, and then just as you crest the little hill, you begin to come off the brake and turn. Just into the corner and you’re back on the gas headed uphill now to the second and third turns. You’re on them before you know it – there’s not even enough time to get nervous. Nervous smervous, you’ve got some serious driving to do. You place your left tires on the seam in the track, your right tires hug the edge the edge, brake and downshift into third. Trailing off the brakes, you coast toward the peak of the hill and turn three. Coming out of the third turn, you accelerate down the hill through turn four and off to the races you go.
You’ll run through 12 more heart-pumping turns at this remarkable race course, before you find yourself back at the long straightaway where you began, and each one requires sophisticated driving techniques. But, have no fear – regardless of your skill level, the Porsche Driving Experience (PDX) is here. With courses ranging from single-day introductory ones that teach you the basics of precision driving all the way to the 4-day Masters RSR Competition Driving Course, the PDX has got you covered. Here at Barber Motorsports Park (and it truly is a park which, as founder George Barber puts it, just happens to have a racetrack) you have the opportunity to do what few human beings ever experience: drive a high-performance race car around a complex road track.
Tucked away in the hills just east of Birmingham, Barber Motorsports Park is a one-of-a-kind destination. Here, a museum houses the largest collection of motorcycles in the world. Here, riders of racing bikes and drivers of everything from Indy cars to antiques try their hand at the complex, 16-turn racecourse. We recommend you make a weekend of it, even if you only take the one-day driving class. You can easily spend another day wandering through the museum, where you’ll find everything from a 1912 Indian board track racer, to a 1959 Triumph Bonneville, to a collection of Lotus race cars. And, the entire collection of more than 1,000 bikes and cars is in pristine condition, thanks to the expertise of a team of highly specialized engineers who work in a lab-like facility in the bottom floor of the museum.
So, come on down to Birmingham. Let your adrenaline run free for a few days. Oh, and while you’re here satisfying your appetite for speed, don’t forget to feed the rest of you. There’s a reason people from all over the world talk about the food down here. With award-winning food ranging from soul food, to barbecue, to exquisite white-table dining (and everything in between) we guarantee you won’t leave hungry.
Visitors… start your engines…